O Come Immanuel: The Christ of the Darkness, or A Farewell Address to 2016

Though the words of Jesus comfort many, his most potent ones summon dramatic imagery that deals frankly in life and death, even when his message is hidden behind the veil of parable. John tells us that Jesus says, "Unless a grain of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit (12:24)." Earlier in the historiography of Jesus Matthew tells us that he tells his disciples, "For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it (16:25)." As institutionalized in the rites of the Memorial Acclamation in the liturgical celebration of the Eucharist, we pray "When we eat this bread and drink this cup, we proclaim your death, O Lord, until you come again." In the latter days leading up to our celebration of Jesus' birth, we are inevitably reminded of his ultimate mission. He, the Human One, embraced death that we might be liberated from the suffering of sin. It is a journey that ultimately all of us are called to engage as He makes us new through suffering and death to our frailty. For some this journey is a natural evolution of growing more in touch with our weakness, embracing the liminal space of what makes us human, and thus links us to the Divine Image implanted within. For others this journey to encounter our True Self is shaped by unthinkable tragedy and suffering. I never thought I would venture this journey as a member of the latter category.

The emotional displacement of embracing multiple markers of identity can be difficult, as I have known for most of my life. Even this year as I have taken marked measures to care for myself, I cannot fully insulate myself from the messages of hatred that I hear from people like our President-Elect and his cabinet of laughably incompetent cronies. I hear that the only way to be right is to be white. I implicitly hear this confirmed in the majority of messages from the church pulpit, where individual piety is championed over a concern for the systematic redemption of the evil that continues to enslave my brothers and sisters. As I grew in my practical knowledge of engaging with this evil, preaching to and teaching students coming from broken homes, addicted to drugs, or fresh off jail time, a fire for wholeness burned within. Often their sense of sin was surprisingly complex. Yes, they made mistakes. Yes, our angers, our prejudices, our sensitivities exacerbate our pain. But there are also racist police officers, or a misunderstanding of psychology, or a failure to accept that the education system had failed many of them. My early years in ministry took more of a toll than I thought. So it was that after a month of traveling, driving up and down the state to raise support for this ministry, now full time, that I found my own mind spinning dangerously out of control. After a wild week where I visited Los Angeles and then returned through Fresno the difficulties of my new context became clear. Isolated from my friends in a quiet suburban neighborhood, I lost sleep. After a few days like this my psychic pain manifested in a series of dramatic hallucinations that left me in handcuffs, escorted swiftly to the emergency room for care. Though my mind was broken and I had delusional thoughts of straddling the boundary between life and death, I remember doing the only thing I could think of as appropriate, seeing that my world was coming to an end. "Hey," I said to the EMT holding my hand and lifting my body onto a stretcher, "Do you know Jesus?" 

Although I was released after a time and returned home to the comforts of football and space with my (by now deeply concerned) family, my mind was not well, and its rapid activity continued to keep me confused, worried, and, at its worst, horrified. I remember fearing the worst as the nurses held me down to sedate me with their syringes in each arm. Instead of the cold death I feared, my mind underwent a long reboot process. I lost my ability to speak coherently. Medication to reduce anxiety was mixed with powerful antipsychotics were difficult for me to accept (apparently), and I was moved to a psychiatric hospital. At the time I did not understand where I was or what I was doing there, but I did see a number of young people of color, tattoos blossoming on their arms, legs, and torsos. Fights broke out, and at one point I proceeded to orchestrate a rap battle between two of my fellow "inmates." Eventually I was moved to a quieter ward where my mind slowly settled down and I befriended a young bearded man named Kevin. I could see the worry in his eyes, and I embraced a role as a sort of resident chaplain for this man and a few others. It was there that I began to pray, finally able to look heavenward when my entire reality seemed to have imploded. I prayed for others. I prayed for healing. This was, after all, the week where the government shut down, and the new Affordable Care Act sent many into a panic over the state of healthcare. I was ready for a new world as I stepped out, exchanging my hospital gown for jeans.

But during my first nights in the hospital, I suffered horrific nightmares that continued to haunt me for long after. My sleep was deeply troubled, and I would lie in bed exhausted, though I did not know what was wrong with me. As the drug cocktail worked I felt a curious sensation of being lifted out of a haze, and that reality was now somehow closer. In those days I was stripped of any mystical portents, and felt a curious mixture of lament (for all that I had believed about God, transcendence, and the like was apparently a lie) and relief. I could act, as the existentialists say, free of the delusions of God for the sake of mankind that is killing itself. But something else happened as well. In the midst of this overwhelming sense of being stripped bare and torn down, I felt the sensation that there was something at my very core, something impenetrable, something invincible that marked my essence. The miracle of the Mental Hospital, so it seems, is that I encountered, beneath the cataclysmic collapse of my world, the kernels of my True Self. 

I was released after a series of conversations (read, I argued loudly with a judge and a few lawyers) and implored to begin rigorous, regular psychotherapy. Those first sessions were deeply meaningful and my doctor helped me connect the dots for the sake of self understanding, but also self protection. Not only is my active mind prone to an onslaught of sensory input, it is difficult for much of this information to be categorized in the same way that most people do so. Critical of most systems of thought and seeking understanding for myself, ideas and inputs get shifted around from place to place in my mental and emotional landscape. Ministry contexts often bring this up because we are attempting to relativize the lessons of scripture and apply them to our situations. But my exposure to the realities of urban ministry created a perfect storm for my fears and anxieties about my vocation to play out in the landscape of my mind. As I healed, I took seriously the call to take care of myself. Regular exercise managed my anxiety and helped with my energy levels. A consistent healthy diet helped as well. But visits from my friends, phone calls, and letters kept the worst waves of depression at bay. As I transitioned to a new life in a new city, I did so intimately aware of the struggles that many of my neighbors faced. But I was forever changed. I did not know the Christ that accompanied me throughout my earlier years, the mythical figure that turned out to be born of my imagination and a stream of religious iconography. Instead, I found solace in the bruised theology of Kierkegaard, the pained questions that Camus poses as he shows Meursault resign to "the benevolent indifference of the universe" when he faces his punishment. I saw Christ answer me as my battery of questions were cast into the mute silence, the endless abyss that I knew dwelt within. I wrestled with the voice of the great Jesuit Karl Rahner, perhaps the most influential Catholic thinker of the twentieth century. According to him, "the ground for the reception of grace is the structure of the human. Within us is the experience of grace, and only in grounding our self reflection of that experience of transcendence will we truly understand ourselves (Michelle E. Gonzalez, A Latino/a constructive anthropology)." This Christ had come to welcome me into his arms, the same arms that held me down and helped me into the ambulance. They were the same arms that reached out across the table for a handshake in the hospital. It was a Christ I had not known before, one where "transcendence" and "grace" held dramatic new, and painful, meanings. 

After a year I was able to stop my medication and only took painkillers intermittently to help me sleep on the worst nights. I lived my life with energy and focus, despite the feeling that joy was ever elusive. It wasn't until last fall that my psychic pain returned, this time in the form of terrible, work-induced stress. The pressures of ministry piled up dramatically and I returned home suffering from waves of manic energy, compounded by physical symptoms like shaky hands and an inability to sleep. Exhausted and horrified by the impending responsibilities of staffing another huge ministry conference, my family drove me to the emergency room in the dark hours of the night, as a steady stream of incoherent babble flowed from my mouth. After holding the hands of my parents, pastors, and nurses caring for me, I was carried by ambulance to a lockdown psychiatric facility, where two sweet EMT's younger than I patiently talked to me and helped to comfort me as I faced the prospect of yet again succumbing to my mental instabilities. I met with another psychiatrist as I got used to the rhythm of resting, eating, and therapy sessions that marked life in the hospital. After speaking to him of my emotional roller coaster, especially as I had been affected by the dramatic changes throughout my whole life, he gave me an official diagnosis for what I had been experiencing: Severe manic-depression, what today we call bipolar disorder. Even as I write this I can think of times in casual conversation where the word bipolar is used as a dismissive pejorative to describe somebody, usually young, and usually female, who is particularly moody or unstable. We think of cute girls who are a little down and then go on yelling fits. Rarely do we picture the type of life changing breaks that the worst of bipolar patients can show, as was the case with me: the buildup of stress, the loss of sleep, and finally, the mania and psychosis.  I was not sure, after my breakdown a few years before, that I could endure another breakdown. I did. This breakdown occurred exactly one year ago as I write these words, and it is fitting that I mark its anniversary by coming to terms with this experience, not allowing its power to merely sit unaddressed in the darkness of my mind and heart. I spent Christmas alone, terrified, and grieving my life in the dark wing of the mental hospital.

Months of grueling recovery, enduring horrific sessions of group therapy, conversations with multiple psychiatrists, and feeble attempts to communicate my condition to those I worked with and loved eventually led me back to some sense of equilibrium. The darkness that greeted me as 2016 yielded to a kind of muted reality. The worst part of this was the constant voices from within and without that forced me to confront my anxiety: am I really just not fit for ministry?

As my body has adjusted to my medication and I've regained my ability to laugh gleefully with my friends, I am able to look back on my experience with more sobriety. What was asked of me during both periods of my life would have pushed anyone over the edge. My problem, which I have learned to militate against now that I've gone through this, is that I did not learn how to say no, how to stop it, how to ask others to help me carry the burdens placed on my shoulders. The Christ that I had created had a surprisingly large amount of Karl in him, and that needed to die one way or another. As I speak with elders, my therapist, and spiritual directors I am told that I am learning what it takes most men until their late forties and fifties to encounter. It is the wisdom of the contemplative, who in his search for union with the Creator has come to terms with the things that he finds most despicable in him. All people carry a mixed bag of dark and light, and our humanity is only redeemed when we see what Christ sees: all of it, and He still loves us. I am convinced now that this journey, encountering my wholeness (which, not coincidentally, is shalom in Hebrew) means embracing my weakness as well as my strength. In my despair I asked a trusted friend with desperation, "Am I just created with a broken mind?" No, he reminded me. My mind is not broken. Like all organs in the body, my brain experiences stress. And because we are still a long way from understanding the mind's connection to the brain, much of my experience will continue to be attenuated in the long years of health ahead of me, despite this illness that has no cure, that I will carry with me for the rest of my life. I am grateful for the advice of patient doctors, my encouraging friends, and those that continue to tell me nice things about how smart or clever or whatever other things I will pretend to refute, but secretly love because affirmation is much needed for me. 

I remember those that reached out to me, and continue to do so, even in times that it is so hard for me to embrace my humanity in the midst of struggling with mental illness. 2016 has taken so much from me, but God has given me so much. Rather than deal in clichés like "this will all work out in God's greater plan for good" (which is just a bit of bad Augustinian theology) I look around the world and consider myself incredibly blessed, considering where many of my brothers and sisters spend their nights and days. May we find our humanity this New Year, that despite a demagogue on the throne of America we might embrace compassion and justice and peace, as our true King Jesus teaches us. In the words of one priest that prayed during the third Sunday of Advent, "May you, Lord God, shatter the darkness that binds our hearts, that your light might flood us and pour out into this hurting world."

All I can say is, Amen.